Ubuntu Linux and LKB Installation

Note: The instructions below are for installing LKB in your own Ubuntu system. If you don't want to install Ubuntu on your machine, you can run a pre-packaged VirtualBox appliance with LKB already installed.

Here is what worked in 2008:

Install ubuntu

You can either buy a book that comes with a Ubuntu disk or burn a disk yourself from the official Ubuntu website. If you want to get a linux-only machine, back up all your system before installing Ubuntu, and install Ubuntu. If you want to get a dual-boot machine, first, defragment your disk a couple of times to get a good chunk of free space on your disk before installing Ubuntu. In case you don't know how to defragment your disk, go to Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter. It might say that you don't need to defragment, but defragment it anyway. You may also want to look into Wubi, although I don't really recommend it. It messes up your computer... FYI, It takes about 30 minutes to install Ubuntu.

Note

If you wanted a dual-boot machine, it seems to work best if you partition your drive with the Windows utility (without formatting the new partition). Then boot from the Ubuntu CD and install to the largest continuous free space (the partition you just created). I strongly recommend also making sure all the drivers work (and maybe even being somewhere that you can have a wired Internet connectoin) before doing your Ubuntu install.

After installing Ubuntu, install emacs if you don't have it.

Any linux distribution comes with Emacs, but it might not be pre-installed. Go to Applications -> Add/Remove, and look for Emacs.

Install LKB (automatic installation.)

Open your terminal, follow the LKB instructions.

At the end of the LKB installation, it'll ask you to put some lines in your .emacs file, so do that.

You may have to create your .emacs file first. Open your emacs, and press Ctrl-x-f, and type ~/.emacs at the bottom of your emacs window.

In your .bashrc (which is in your home directory), put the following lines:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DELPHINHOME/lkb/lib/linux.x86.32:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

export DELPHINHOME=/home/mayo/delphin

OR

export DELPHINHOME=~/delphin

NOTE: "/home/mayo/" should be replaced with yours, obviously... The automatic LKB installation would tell you what your path is.

Edit your dot.emacs file

Go to ~/delphin/lkb/etc, and open dot.emacs. Change Line 63.

(load "fi-site-init" nil t)

to

(load "~/delphin/eli/fi-site-init" nil t)

(Thanks to Mayo Kudo for documenting her experience.)

[gslayden 12/13/2008] After installing as above on ubuntu x64, I got an error that libXm.so.4 couldn't be found when loading LKB in emacs. This appears to be fixed by creating a symbolic link in the ~/delphin/lkb/lib/linux.x86.64 directory as follows:

ln -s libXm.so.3 libXm.so.4

[brodbd 1/30/2009] Using Ubuntu x86_64, I got this error when I tried to launch itsdb: "/bin/bash: /home/brodbd/delphin/lkb/bin/linux.x86.64/swish++: No such file or directory". Eventually I figured out the fix is to install the 32-bit libraries as follows:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

[gslayden 5/8/2009] If you get the following

Warning: Xt:

Name: Text

Class: XmTextField

Character '\57' not supported in font. Discarded. when opening a file in the LKB, try typing 'unset LANG' at the bash prompt before starting the LKB